Exploring the Possible Futures of the Ames Mill dam through Location-based AR

When tasked with visualizing the potential futures of the Ames Mill dam, we were inspired by several video games. The first is Disco Elysium, an RPG that is mostly about solving a murder mystery, but also features a very well-developed world, which talks to the player in the form of a skill called Shivers. We were inspired by how this mechanic has a random element, meaning that different players will get different glimpses into the world. We thought this would work well for an exploration into the future, since there are many different possibilities and we don’t want everyone to have the same experience.

The other game that inspired us is the location based (and much more well-known) Pokémon Go. We wanted to create something tied to specific locations in the real world, and to encourage users to seek out these randomly occurring futures, so Pokémon Go has been a framework for how we have built this game.

Our project is a location based game where players track down “confluences”, time anomalies that appear in real-world locations. When the player gets close, they can interact with confluences to see one of many possible futures. Their goal is to collect as many of these as possible, filling up the “Book of Basins” with the ones that they have seen.

To view the demo version of the game in the game engine, watch the video below:

To see a mockup of other interactions in the game, see the PDF below: